As I may have mentioned before, the arch on the back of the boat is done! The only thing left before the boat can go into the water is the swim step platform extension.  It’ll make the back of the boat way more usable for swimming off of and standing on! Dan came by the other day and got it all started!

Dan went back to the shop and added the lower supports for the wood insert.

On the friday before Dan went on vacation for a week he came by early in the morning and we got the swim step fully installed! There are still a few little odds and ends that need to be done to call it fully finished, but we can now safely put the boat in the water!

Now that the structure is done, we can start on the actual platform part.  Real teak was too expensive, so we went with “plasteak”, a type of brown fake wood.  It looks close enough to real wood that you can’t tell until you’re close and we’ll never have to varnish it! Sounds good to me! The downside I found out was that it’s *super* heavy… so while moving it around the boat, all 4 planks came out of the box and smashed my fingers against the winch.  Which hurt… A LOT! It’s been a week now and they’re still bruised.  I’m hoping that weight just translates into strength.

Either way… I hate woodworking and we have enough projects, so we paid Holland Marine for Murphy to come out and spend most of the day cutting the planks to size and installing them.  I like that we didn’t have to do anything with them and it looks fantastic!

We still have a few little things to finish up on the arch and swim step.  There are backing plates, plates to fill some existing holes, and other stuff to install, but overall it’s functional and looks better than I could have imagined! Can’t wait to get out into the water and start using it!